Review: Father Was a Vicious Bully. Then He Became a Woman.

On July 7, 2004, Susan Faludi received an email with a one-word subject line: “Changes.” To describe it as an understatement would itself be an understatement. The note was from Ms. Faludi’s father, with whom she had barely spoken in 25 years. He was writing to say that he — now she — had just had sex reassignment surgery in Thailand. Steven Faludi had become Stefánie. He was 76.

“I’d always known my father to assert the male prerogative,” Ms. Faludi writes in the opening pages of “In the Darkroom,” trying to convey the dissonance and drama of this announcement. “He had seemed invested — insistently, inflexibly, and, in the last year of our family life, bloodily — in being the household despot.”

The “bloodily” part is especially chilling. When Ms. Faludi was 17, her father burst into her house and attacked her mother’s boyfriend with a baseball bat, then with a knife. When Steven Faludi wasn’t bullying his family, he was a “paragon of the Popular Mechanics weekend man,” busy with carpentry projects and experiments in electronics. Yet now, here was this same tyrant, in a photo attachment, wearing a red skirt and sheer sleeveless blouse.

Or was she not the same tyrant at all?

“In the Darkroom” is an absolute stunner of a memoir — probing, steel-nerved, moving in ways you’d never expect. Ms. Faludi is determined both to demystify the father of her youth — “a simultaneously inscrutable and volatile presence, a black box and a detonator” — and to re-examine the very notion and nature of identity. In doing so, she challenges some of our most fundamental assumptions about transsexuality, most notably by suggesting that the decision to change sexes may sometimes involve more than gender-identity questions alone.

It’s a position I imagine that will invite pushback, and almost certainly — understandably — anger. Trans activists would be quite right to point out that we cannot infer much of anything about transgender concerns from a single case study. This book provides plenty of analyses with which to quarrel.

But in telling her father’s story, Ms. Faludi is also adding a layer of complexity to this evolving canon of literature, and she’s doing it with typical brio. Having spent a lifetime interrogating conventions of gender, she’s uncannily suited to write this book. (Ms. Faludi is best known for her 1991 best seller, “Backlash,” a withering dissection of a culture traumatized by women’s progress.) Time Magazine may have declared in 2014 that we’d reached the “Transgender Tipping Point,” establishing gender identity as the next frontier in civil rights. But Ms. Faludi was, and remains, unimpressed with the media’s uncritical scrutiny of this subject, “with all the requisite tropes of victimization, heroism and celebrity. Rarely did the fanfare convey the daily texture of complicated ordinary lives.”

What do stories about Caitlyn Jenner, she seems to be saying, have to do with the extraordinarily complicated man who raised her?

Ms. Faludi’s father, Istvan Karoly Friedman, was born in Hungary in 1927. He was a Budapest Jew surrounded by abundant wealth and little love; as a teenager during the Nazi occupation, he was left to fend for himself while his parents roved from one refuge to the next. All three survived, but few in their extended family did. His parents eventually went to Israel, and he to the United States.

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Susan FaludiCreditSigrid Estrada

When Ms. Faludi first visits her father post-surgery, Stefánie is living in Budapest, having relocated there after the fall of communism in 1989. Ms. Faludi cannot help but view her father’s transition through feminist spectacles. She notes with dismay how entranced Stefánie is with the rites and aesthetics of femininity: She obsesses over clothing and cosmetics; she delights in male attentiveness. “You write about the disadvantages of being a woman,” Stefánie pointedly tells her daughter, “but I’ve only found advantages.” Especially when it comes to assists with home repair.

What truly troubles Ms. Faludi, though, is how opaque her father remains, even after her operation, about the nature of her gender identity. Stefánie never met the requirements observed by most doctors to get her gender reassignment surgery (on the contrary, she went to elaborate lengths to skirt them). And she never gives her daughter a straight answer about whether she’d always felt herself to be a woman. “This is who you were all along? This is your true self?” Ms. Faludi asks.

“Waaall,” her father answers (the Hungarian cadences in this book are fabulous), “it’s who I am now. Since the operation. I have developed another personality.”

What Ms. Faludi eventually suspects is that her father’s late-in-life decision to change sexes may be determined by a much broader variety of personal and historical forces, and that gender, as she has long argued, is more fluid than we’d like to believe. She knows that she should resist the temptation to connect her father’s being transgender with the Holocaust — or more specifically, his extraordinarily vexed Jewish identity. But it’s awfully tempting. Her ambivalence is poignantly clear.

In 1944, every Budapest man who wasn’t in uniform risked “trouser inspections” — meaning her father’s genitalia, which he’d one day be rid of, could at any moment have betrayed him as a Jew. In general, the Jewish men of Hungary in the early 20th century were depicted as feminine and neurasthenic, while the Jewish women, especially if they were well educated, somehow escaped this fate, often marrying members of Budapest’s Christian ruling class.

“What had been the cost, I wondered, to one striving-to-assimilate Jewish boy growing up in such a system?” Ms. Faludi writes.

Stefánie denies that growing up in such a climate had any effect on her self-concept. And who are we to tell her it did? Thousands of Hungarian Jewish men survived that era without ever once reimagining themselves as women.

Yet Ms. Faludi can’t help but notice that when Stefánie imitates other Jews — like those she tried to enlist to help get her family property back — she speaks in a high voice and uses mincing gestures. “Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman,” she writes, “making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.”

At moments, Stefánie herself seems to conflate her change in sex with a kind of religious conversion. When she attends an opera in an old synagogue with Ms. Faludi, she tells her daughter that her fellow patrons are all looking at her and saying to one another, “There’s an overdressed shiksa.”

As “In the Darkroom” progresses, it becomes clear that Ms. Faludi’s father will always elude explanation. The real Rosebud the author provides is her own. Her identity as a feminist, she realizes, sprang from her father’s “desperation to assert the masculine persona he had chosen.” That it never suited Istvan, and then Steven, is achingly clear. Whether Stefánie suited her better is hard to say, but perhaps is not our call to make: It was, at least, a choice she freely made. “Women,” she tells her daughter, “get away with murder!”

In the Darkroom

By Susan Faludi

417 pages. Metropolitan Books. $32.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Father Was a Bully. and Then a Woman.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe